


Sex while Parents

by toujours_nigel



Category: Pride (2014)
Genre: Families of Choice, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 20:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3542759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sex while Parents

**Author's Note:**

  * For [filia_noctis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/gifts).



They’ve got children. Not what one would expect of two gay men in their mid-thirties who decorate the stairs with banners about the appropriate usage of closets, but horribly true.

It’s not just the political meetings in the surprisingly cosy back-room of Gay’s the Word, those’ve been going on since before Gethin took over the place from Andrew, who’d retired—actually retired, darlings, not an euphemism for dead from AIDS—and shuffled off to Bath or Brighton or who the hell knew where to live the rest of his sanctimoniously kind, Christian life. Hell, he and Gethin’d met at a political meeting, and conducted the early months of their affair over planning slogans and protests and glue-and-run midnight postering sessions. It’s not even the ubiquitous Mark Ashton. If you’re out, proud, and political, you know Mark Ashton; if you’re even a bit of a Pinko, you like him. Jonathan loves him to bits. Gethin favours Mike, thinks Mark’s too loud, too brash and not always careful of the consequences. It isn’t worth a fight.

It isn’t worth a fight because Mark isn’t the trouble. No more is Mike. Or Jeff. Or Zoe. Or Stella. No. The problem is Bromley. Well, and Steph, a bit. He hates to admit this, because Steph’s the sort of brash, loudmouthed, brutish young woman he feels he can get behind. But there’s no way of denying that she was the thin end of the wedge. Before her the kids were limited to politics in the shop back-room and the occasional party in the house. Everyone assumed an adult, him and Gethin not unduly worried about personal lives or fall-outs or health, safety, and sanity. Even the first few months of LGSM, they’d all been… comrades, rising friends even, but all putatively equal. And then there had been Christmas. ’s hard to play at all adults here when you’ve come upon a twenty-three year-old cuddled up in a monstrous shawl you hand-knit, watching Blackadder and snickering and looking roughly twelve, orange hair and under-cut and everything. He hadn’t gone and scooped her up in a hug, but it’d been a narrowly-fought victory, and when he’d turned around he’d spotted Gethin watching her from the kitchen, looking suspiciously soppy. Alarm bells and claxons ought to have gone off them, screeching and banging and shrill, but it’d been Christmas and Gethin looked at peace, so they’d just leaned in and had a bit of a snog while Steph pretended not to know they were there.

Then things had looked good, even on the kids-front, not that he knew it for what it was, just then. Sure, every scrap of material related to the concert had ended up in the back-room and then the Insomniac Ladies from Powys had taken over his bed and bedroom. The strike ending had been a wrench and Gethin getting into fights had been terrifying, but it was still all business as usual. Mike and Jeff had hovered helpfully and Steph had just hovered, but they were useful just then and didn’t demand anything of him. Mark had fucked off and Bromley, poor child, had been under house-arrest, of all morally dubious and pathetically outdated things. For a while it had seemed like going back before LGSM, wrapped up in each other, even though Bromley _had_ come back and he and Steph were in the book-store more nights than not, chomping through Leaves of Grass like it was Shakespeare and reading Shakespeare for cheap thrills and dick jokes.

Bromley. It was all down to him in the end, of course, with the vulnerable eyes and the wrenching inexperience. He had to be found a job, Bromley did, and shown where to shop, and who not to get into a fight with, and which shops he could get his clothes half-off at. Steph helped, but Steph had her own job to be thinking of, after miraculously not having been laid off, and Jonathan, well, he’d got used to having a project. And when Bromley followed him home of an evening after an afternoon’s shopping, or begged for the use of his kitchen to turn out better-than-mediocre pastries, well, that was still _friends_ , right? Nevermind he could just about have fathered Bromley if he’d ever been a skirt-lifter. It was good for the community that the youngsters should have older friends, he’d had his share, back in the sixties.

And now here they were, a month after Pride, jammed onto his sofa watching Coronation Street, bracketing Gethin like two overly affectionate bookends. They’d been around every night for a week, came around after the shop closed and settled in. Brought booze or food, usually, or offered to split the takeaway bill, but at this point Jonathan would’ve preferred freeloaders. They didn’t tend to expect a cosy chat every bloody night. They hadn’t gone to bed before two even once, and Gethin got up at the ungodly hour of six to prep the book-shop, and between that and Jonathan’s rehearsals their newest little PVC helper has stayed shrink-wrapped in the back of Jonathan’s bureau all week.

They have children. It’s official. Children who eat their food and hog their sofa and effectively cock-block them both. What’s he ever done to deserve this?

“Should I start the list alphabetically?” Gethin asks from behind him. “Yes, you were talking out loud. Come in, won’t you?”

Now, Jonathan’s a man of many parts. He even has straight friends, and he listens to them bitch about their kids endlessly, even pays attention on occasion. One thing he’s heard is with kids in the house you have to revert to sneaking around like teenagers or bid adieu to your sex-life. Well, he’s bloody well not doing the latter, and right about now it seems good, solid advice.

He pulls Gethin close, ignoring the fact that both kids have stopped paying attention to the television set—radar, they’ve got, for knowing when the dads are kissing—and murmurs, “If we’re loud, they might leave.”


End file.
